A study of semantic treatment of three Chinese anomic patients

A treatment combining semantic feature analysis and semantic priming was carried out on three Cantonese-speaking brain-injured individuals with word-finding difficulties. Two of the participants with mild to moderate semantic impairment demonstrated significant progress on naming performance. Treatment effects also generalised to semantically related and unrelated untrained items. However, only one of these two participants was able to maintain the treatment gain for at least one month after the therapy was completed. The third patient with severe semantic deficits did not benefit from the intervention. The different outcomes of these participants to the same intervention were explained in terms of the nature of the treatment approach, the patients' underlying language deficits, and their level of cognitive abilities.